other, however, took the cash out of his dead father's pocket, and would not part with it till Charles promised to pay the whole expence of burying the old man ; which he did; and insisting afterwards on his right, the elder brother turned him out of doors; and though he knew he was master of such an important secret, would not give the least as sistance to him, nor a morsel of bread to his hungry children begging at their uncle's door. Charles kept a little ale-house at a gate leading down to his brother's house; which gate he used frequently to open to him, pulling off his hat at the same time; yet he would never speak to him. Not only his brother, but the whole country round, had reason to complain of his churlishness and rigour. He would scarce suffer a man, not qualified, to keep a dog, or a gun; so that he was universally feared and hated. Besides his incest, and the murder of the young woman, who was with child by him, he confessed, that he broke one Amos Killer's arm, with a violent blow, which occasioned the poor fellow's death. NATURAL HISTORY. An Essay on a method of classing mal, vegetable, and mineral; and WITH animals. ITH regard to the general order, and the method of distribution of the different subjects of natural history, it is purely arbitrary; and therefore we are sufficiently at liberty to chuse that which appears the most commodious, or the most commonly received. But, before we give the reasons that might determine us to adopt one order rather than another, it is necessary to make some further reflections, whereby we will endeayour to shew what reality there may be in the divisions that have been of natural productions. In order to know this, we must, for a moment, divest ourselves of our prejudices, and even strip ouselves of our notions. Let us suppose a man who had actually forgot every thing, or who awakes quite fresh to view the objects that surround him; let us place such a man in the field, where animals, birds, fishes, plants, stones, &c. present themselves successively to his eyes. In the first rencounters he will distinguish nothing, and confound every thing; but let his ideas be gradually confirmed by reiterated sensations of the same objects, he will soon form to himself a a general idea of animated matter: he will easily distinguish it from inanimated matter, and in a little time after, he will distinguish very well animated matter from vegetative, and naturally arrive at this first grand division, namely, ani as he shall have taken, at the same time, a clear idea of these grand objects that are so different, viz. the earth, the air, and the water, he will come in a little time to form a particular idea of animals that dwell upon the earth, of those that reside in the waters, and those that fly aloft in the air; and consequently, he will easily form to himself this second division of animals, namely, quadrupeds, birds, and fishes: the same thing will happen in the vegetable kingdom, as trees and plants; he will distinguish them very well, either as to their bulk, their substance, or figure. This is what a bare inspection must necessarily produce in him, and what with a very slender degree of attention, he cannot fail to know, and this is likewise what he ought to consider as real, and as a division which nature herself has made; let us put ourselves in the place of such a man, or let us suppose he has acquired the same degree of knowledge, and has the same degree of experience as we have; he will judge of the objects of natural history according to the relations they bear to him those objects that are the most necessary and useful, will hold the first rank; for instance, he will give the preference, in the order of animals, to the horse, the dog, the ox, &c, and he will always much better know those that are most familiar to him; in the next place, he will be taken up with such animals, as, though not so fa miliar to him, yet live in the same place and climate, as the deer, hares, and all the wild animals; and it will be only after, the acquisition of all this knowledge that his curiosity will lead him to find out what may be the animals of foreign climates, as the elephant, dromedary, &c. The case will be the same as to fishes, birds, insects, shells, plants, minerals, and all other productions of nature; he will study these in proportion to the uses he may draw from them, according as they present themselves the more familiarly to him: and he will arrange them in his mind, according to this order of his knowledge, because it is actually the order according to which he has acquired it, and according to which it concerns him to retain them. This order, the most natural of all others, is that which I would recommend, believing that this simple and natural method of consider ing things is preferable to any methods that are more far fetched and more compounded, because there is none either of such as have been already adopted, or of all those that may be formed, but in which there is more of the arbitrary than in this; and that, to take every thing, it is much easier, and more agreeable and useful for us, to consider things with regard to ourselves, than under any other point of view. Two objections, I foresee, may be here started: first, that these grand divisions, which we consider as real, are not, perhaps, accurate; that, for instance, we are not certain, that a line of separation can be drawn betwixt the animal and vegetable kingdoms, or even betwixt the vegetable kingdom and the mineral, and that there may be found in nature some things that equally partake of the properties of the one The second objection may be, that by pursuing this order we must join together objects very different; for example, in the history of animals, if we begin with those that are the most useful and familiar to us, we shall be obliged to give the his Bb 3 tory tery of a dog, after or before that of a horse; a thing which does not seem natural, because these animals are so different in all other respects, that they do not at ali. 1.appear to have been made, to be placed so near each other, in a treatise of natural history; and perhaps it may be further urged, that it would be better to follow the ancient method of the division of animals into whole-footed, and cloven-footed, or the modern method of division, by their teeth, and teats, &c. This objection, which at first may appear pretty plausible, will vanish when we come to examine it. Were it not better to arrange, not only in a treatise of natural history, but even in a picture, or any where else, objects in the order and position in which they are commonly found, than to force them to be joined together by virtue of any hypothesis! Would it not be better to make the horse, who is whole-hoofed, to be followed by the dog, who is claw-footed, and actually uses to follow him, than an animal we know little of, and which probably has no other relation with a horse than that of being whole-hoofed? Add to this, does there not arise the same inconvenience from the differences in this arrangement as in ours? Does a lion, because clawfooted, resemble a rat, which is so too, more than a horse resembles a dog? Does a whole-hoofed elephant resemble an ass that his whole-hoofed too, more than a stag, which is cloven-footed? And should we follow the new method, in which the teeth and the teats are the specific characters, and upon which the divisions and distributions are founded, shall we find that a lion is more like a bat, than a horse is like a dog? Or rather, to make our comparison a little more exact, does a horse resemble a hog more than dog, or is a dog more like a 'mole than a horse? And since there are as many inconveniencies, and as great differences in these methods of arrangement, as in that we have adopted, and seeing, besides this, these methods have not the same advantages, and are a great deal more remote from the common and natural method of considering things, we have sufficient reason for giving it the preference. We shall not particularly examine all the artificial methods that have been given in the division of animais; they are all more or less subject to inconveniencies: and it appears to us, that the examen of one of them only, is sufficient to discover the faults of the rest; we shall therefore here confine ourselves to examine the method of the celebrated Linnæus, which is the most modern, whereby we may be enabled to judge whether we had reason to reject it, and confine ourselves solely to the natural order in which all mankind are wont to view and consider things. Linnæus divides all animals into six classes, viz quadrupeds, birds, amphibious creatures, fishes, insects, and worms. The first division is very arbitrary and very incomplete: for it gives us, no idea of certain kinds of animals, which are, nevertheless, very considerable and extensive; serpents for example, shell-fish, and crustaceous animals, appear at first glance to have been forgotten; for, at first, one does not imagine that serpents are amphibious, that crustaceous animals are insects, and shell animals worms; if, instead of making only six classes, he had made twelve, twelve, or more, and had said quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, amphibious creatures, cetaceous fish, oviparous fish, soft fish, crustaceous fish, shellfish, terrestrial insects, marine insects, and those found in fresh water, &c. he would have expressed himself more distinctly, and his divisions would have been more true, and less arbitrary; for, in general, the more the number of the divisions of natural productions is augmented, the nearer we shall approach to the truth, since only individuals do really exist in nature, and since genuses, orders, and classes, only exist in our own imaginations. Upon examiningthe general characters, which he makes use of, and the manner in which he makes his particular divisions, we shall find defects therein, that are much more essential; for example, a general character, such as that taken from the mamma or teats, in the division of quadrupeds, ought at least to belong to all quadrupeds, and yet from the time of Aristotle, we know that the horse has no maminæ. He divides the class of quadru peds into five orders: the first he calls anthromorpha, or those resem bling the human form; the second, fera, or wild beasts; the third, glires, or wild rats; the fourth, jumenta, or beasts of burden'; and the fifth, pecora, or cattle; and ac cording to him, all quadrupeds are included in these five classes. We may discover, by the bare enumeration of these orders, that this division is not only arbitrary, but very injudiciously made: for he places in this first order, man, the monkey, the Guinea lubbard, and the shelllizard. Let us go on to the second order, which he calls wild beasts; and here indeed he begins with the lion and tiger, but he proceeds with the cat, the weazle, the otter, the sea-calf, the dog, the bear, the badger; and he ends with the hedgehog, the mole, and the bat. Who could ever have imagined, that the name of a wild beast could have been given to the bat, the mole, and the hedge-hog! that such domestic animals as the dog and the cat were wild beasts! and is there not herein as great an ambiguity with regard to good sense, as well as with regard to the words? But let us proceed to the third class, namely, the wild rats of M. Linnæus, which are the porcupine,the hare, the squirrel, the beaver, and the common rat. I declare, that in all this, I see but one species of rats, which, in fact, is the wild rat. The fourth order is that of beasts of carriage, which are the elephant, the hippopotamus, or river horse, the shrew-mouse, the horse and the pig. What a strange, what a chimerical arrangement this! His fifth and last order is cattle, which comprises the camel, the deer, the goat, the ram, and the ox. But what difference is there not evidently between a camel and a ram," or between a deer and a goat? And what reason can there be to pretend that there are animals of the same class, if it be not this, that having absolutely a mind to form classes, and but a sinall number of them,we must comprise therein beasts of all kinds? In fine, by examining the last divisions of animals into particular species, we find that the lupus cervinus is no other than a species of cats; the fox and wolf a species of dog; the civet a species of badger; the Indian pig a species of hare; the water-rat a species of B b 4 beaver; 1 |